I can’t remember the last time I opened a newspaper or magazine and didn’t see a photograph of some brilliant, gleaming new monument to the extraordinary rise of China. It’s the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games: Time to show the rubes what a new superpower looks like!
Here is the Egg, the astonishing, curvilinear structure that is Beijing’s new performing-arts center. Here is the Bird’s Nest, another staggeringly elegant feat of engineering in which the world’s athletes will compete. Here, too, is the stunning, assembled-overnight marvel of modern Shanghai, laid out in miniature for the wonderment of all.
They’re thinking big, these Chinese, and, as innumerable Beijingers have told us over the airwaves, the people of the People’s Republic hope at last we’ll see the New China.
Oddly enough, there haven’t been many glossy photographs of Liu Shaokun as he undergoes “re-education through labor” for posting photographs of crushed schools after the Sichuan earthquake three months ago. Liu is a teacher — or was — until he embarrassed the Communist authorities by “disseminating rumors and destroying social order.”
Indeed, far from the adoring camera’s eye, China’s horrific lao gai labor camp system — Mao’s answer to the Soviet Gulag Archipelago — still hums along efficiently today.
Tens of thousands of potential troublemakers have reportedly been sent to the lao gai this year alone, to keep them from sullying the glory of the Games, “destroying social order” with their irksome presence, or leaving a blot on New China’s alluring close-up with the world’s media.
As neighborhoods were being forcibly bulldozed to make way for all these handsome new Olympic structures, China held on to its world-beating lead in prisoner executions (8,000 to 10,000 annually).
According to lao gai expert Harry Wu, who, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, experienced his country’s system firsthand, China ranks second only to the U.S. in the number of organs it transplants. About 95 percent of those Chinese organ donors are — or were — convicts.
An army of censors keeps tight controls on what Chinese can see on the Internet. This smothering of free discourse is half joked-about in the West as “the Great Firewall of China.” In defiance of earlier promises, the censorship will extend to visiting journalists during the Games.
Meanwhile, reporters were kept out of Lhasa as Tibetan monks were slaughtered this spring. Oh, and this week Chinese paramilitaries beat up two Japanese reporters.
It was a mistake, giving the Games to Beijing. We should never have done it — as we should never have countenanced the Olympic Games going to the Soviet Union in 1980, or to Nazi Germany in 1936. Tyrannies do not merit Olympic prestige.
Yet we did it. We did it from fright, not strength. Normal, cajoling diplomatic efforts to soften China’s treatment of political dissidents, Tibetans, Uighurs, Catholics, Protestants, practitioners of Falun Gong, women pregnant with their second child, farmers who object to rapacious Communist Party officials — all these have failed, for decades.
So we — the right-thinkers, the good-intenders — we thought soft power could wreak the kind of change we sought. Just the very promise of the Olympic Games would surely cause the Chinese tyrants to deal more gently with us all, wouldn’t it?
And look how the authorities shut down the factories before the Olympic Committee visited, back in 1993, so that there would be no smog to offend?
I saw it; I was there. Didn’t that show a kind of good faith, that we all could at least agree on the kind of environment in which the Games would be played?
It hasn’t worked. China is not kinder or gentler, just richer and more powerful.
We did not act in our interests by giving the honor of Olympic hosting to what, however shined up and gleaming, is still a remorseless police state. We did not serve ourselves, or the Americans who will come after us, by buffing the self-esteem of a dangerous rival.
It is too late, to deprive China of the glamour and prestige of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.
But it is not too late for each of us in our private hearts — and for members of the Olympic Committee — to resolve that this must never happen again.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
